Overgeneralization

A very conspicuous feature of jargon is the frequency with which
techspeak items such as names of program tools, command language primitives,
and even assembler opcodes are applied to contexts outside of computing
wherever hackers find amusing analogies to them. Thus (to cite one of the
best-known examples) Unix hackers often grep for things
rather than searching for them. Many of the lexicon entries are
generalizations of exactly this kind.

Hackers enjoy overgeneralization on the grammatical level as well. Many
hackers love to take various words and add the wrong endings to them to make
nouns and verbs, often by extending a standard rule to nonuniform cases (or
vice versa). For example, because porous → porosity and generous →
generosity, hackers happily generalize:

mysterious → mysteriosity

ferrous → ferrosity

obvious → obviosity

dubious → dubiosity

Another class of common construction uses the suffix
‘-itude’ to abstract a quality from just about any adjective or
noun. This usage arises especially in cases where mainstream English would
perform the same abstraction through ‘-iness’ or
‘-ingness’. Thus:

win → winnitude (a common exclamation)

loss → lossitude

cruft → cruftitude

lame → lameitude

Some hackers cheerfully reverse this transformation; they argue, for
example, that the horizontal degree lines on a globe ought to be called
‘lats’ — after all, they're measuring latitude!

Also, note that all nouns can be verbed. E.g.: “All nouns can be
verbed”, “I'll mouse it up”, “Hang on while I
clipboard it over”, “I'm grepping the files”. English as
a whole is already heading in this direction (towards pure-positional grammar
like Chinese); hackers are simply a bit ahead of the curve.

The suffix “-full” can also be applied in generalized and
fanciful ways, as in “As soon as you have more than one cachefull of
data, the system starts thrashing,” or “As soon as I have more
than one headfull of ideas, I start writing it all down.” A common use
is “screenfull”, meaning the amount of text that will fit on one
screen, usually in text mode where you have no choice as to character
size. Another common form is “bufferfull”.

However, hackers avoid the unimaginative verb-making techniques
characteristic of marketroids, bean-counters, and the Pentagon; a hacker would
never, for example, ‘productize’, ‘prioritize’, or
‘securitize’ things. Hackers have a strong aversion to
bureaucratic bafflegab and regard those who use it with contempt.

Similarly, all verbs can be nouned. This is only a slight
overgeneralization in modern English; in hackish, however, it is good form to
mark them in some standard nonstandard way. Thus:

win → winnitude, winnage

disgust → disgustitude

hack → hackification

Further, note the prevalence of certain kinds of nonstandard plural
forms. Some of these go back quite a ways; the TMRC Dictionary includes an
entry which implies that the plural of ‘mouse’ is
meeces, and notes that the defined plural of
‘caboose’ is ‘cabeese’. This latter has apparently
been standard (or at least a standard joke) among railfans (railroad
enthusiasts) for many years

On a similarly Anglo-Saxon note, almost anything ending in
‘x’ may form plurals in ‘-xen’ (see
VAXen and boxen in the main
text). Even words ending in phonetic /k/ alone are sometimes treated this
way; e.g., ‘soxen’ for a bunch of socks. Other funny plurals are
the Hebrew-style ‘frobbotzim’ for the plural of
‘frobbozz’ (see frobnitz) and
‘Unices’ and ‘Twenices’ (rather than
‘Unixes’ and ‘Twenexes’; see
Unix, TWENEX in main text). But
note that ‘Twenexen’ was never used, and ‘Unixen’ was
seldom sighted in the wild until the year 2000, thirty years after it might
logically have come into use; it has been suggested that this is because
‘-ix’ and ‘-ex’ are Latin singular endings that
attract a Latinate plural. Among Perl hackers it is reported that
‘comma’ and ‘semicolon’ pluralize as
‘commata’ and ‘semicola’ respectively. Finally, it
has been suggested to general approval that the plural of
‘mongoose’ ought to be ‘polygoose’.

The pattern here, as with other hackish grammatical quirks, is
generalization of an inflectional rule that in English is either an import or
a fossil (such as the Hebrew plural ending ‘-im’, or the
Anglo-Saxon plural suffix ‘-en’) to cases where it isn't normally
considered to apply.

This is not ‘poor grammar’, as hackers are generally quite
well aware of what they are doing when they distort the language. It is
grammatical creativity, a form of playfulness. It is done not to impress but
to amuse, and never at the expense of clarity.